Just the Gist: Dr. Dog's Scott McMicken

Dr. Dog, the band. Scott McMicken and Toby Leaman are third and fourth from left, respectively. Got that?
Scott McMicken is one half of the songwriting team behind Philadelphia’s Dr. Dog. The talkative half. That’s partly because his counterpart, Toby Leaman, is nursing a bruised esophagus, but not entirely. I spent more than an hour on the phone with McMicken last week. Here’s the gist of what he had to say.

Dr. Dog—a retro-rock outfit with an acknowledged debt to the Beatles, the Band, and the Beach Boys—was supposed to start touring last week in support of its delightful new album, Fate, but the kickoff shows in New York were postponed because Leaman couldn’t sing: “Two Saturdays ago, he was on a lake getting pulled on a tube by a boat driven by Justin, our drummer. He was on the tube with his wife, Sarah, and something got fouled up and they collided. Her head went right into the front of his neck, pretty hard.” The shows have been rescheduled for August 26 and 27.

Dr. Dog owes its success to My Morning Jacket singer Jim James, whom McMicken met through his girlfriend at the time. “I put together 10 songs to give him, on a CD, just pulled from these piles of tapes that we had, and I called it Toothbrush, because that was my girlfriend’s Dr. Dog name. [Everyone in the band has a ‘Dr. Dog name’ that starts with the letter T. McMicken’s is Taxi.] So a couple months later, we’re on the road with My Morning Jacket, and we’re like, ‘We need some kind of CD to sell at the merch table.’ So we just made copies of Toothbrush, and that’s how a mix I made for Jim James became our first album.”

On second thought, McMicken and Leaman may owe their success to a Philadelphia bartender named Steve: “Me and Toby used to wash dishes at this upscale place called the London Grill. We’d stay up all nights recording and then we’d give our tapes to this bartender, so as soon as he struck up an interest—and at that point he was the only one outside the people we were living with who seemed interested at all—we started just feeding him tapes all the time. He eventually offered us an opportunity to play acoustically as Dr. Dog on a Monday night at the bar, which we did. But it was a young professionals’ kind of bar—a ‘come in, loosen your tie, have a martini’ kind of bar—and I think we just freaked some people out. So we were like, ‘Steve, maybe if we did some covers, or we also double as a bluegrass band,’ so he was like, ‘Yeah, why don’t you try that next time.’ So we started playing bluegrass and it just caught on. And we were eventually making more money playing bluegrass in one night there than we did washing dishes for a week, so we quit washing dishes and only played bluegrass.

The discovery of the cover art seems to have been ordained by fate: “Late fall of last year, we were in Chicago on tour and we went to a bar called The Rainbow Bar or something and there was that painting hanging behind the bar. We were all struck by it, so we asked the bartender about it, and it turned out he had made it. So we convinced him to sell it to us.”

In fact, fate is everywhere McMicken looks these days. “The idea of calling the album Fate came up completely arbitrarily, based on the fact that we had a song called ‘Fate.’ But the more I thought about fate, the more I realized that it isn't just this romantic notion or this mushy mysticism or this dodging-of-purpose or anything. It’s actually this living, breathing thing—this balance between free will and chance. Choice and chance. And I find it comforting in so many levels
. The songs are still a cross-section of songwriting that probably spans eight years. None of these songs were written in relation to each other intentionally, but they all ended up that way.”